A Little Word-Play from the Archives
Pull up a chair, dear hearts. You know your Gramma Ana can’t resist a good tumble through the dictionary, but today I went on a bit of a digital safari. I took a little Google hunt for "anagram game" to see what the modern world is playing with these days. I’ll admit, with a tiny blush, that I was also looking to see if my own name had popped up in the search results yet. No such luck so far—but don’t you worry, I’m still young! There’s plenty of time for me to become a household name.
While I didn't find my own face staring back at me, I did stumble upon a delightful little treasure from the past. It’s a letter to the editor of The New York Times, dated all the way back to October 1906. It seems people have been using letters as tiny weapons for a very long time!
THE ANAGRAM GAME.
ANTI-FAKE.
Oct. 6, 1906
To the Editor of The New York Times:Your correspondent “Julius” has been to great trouble in order to distort the names of Hughes and Hearst in order to get what he thinks is a joke out of them. It was evidently a hard task, for I notice he had to inject an additional “s” into Hughes to get the word “guess.”
But he thinks Hearst is easily transformed into “hearts,” and gathers much satisfaction therefrom. Why, what nonsense! He can make “trashe” out of him. He can make a variety of “earths” out of him, and to show that all voters have not got him in their hearts he can make “haters” out of him.
New York, Oct. 5, 1906. ANTI-FAKE.
Of course, I was intrigued! Who is Julius and what did he write to earn ANTI-FAKE's scorn? And how did anagrams come into play? So, I did some digging, and here's what I learned.
Back in 1906, the folks in New York were all stirred up over the race for Governor. It was a real clash of the titans between a sharp-as-a-tack lawyer named Charles Evans Hughes and a wealthy newspaper man you might’ve heard of, William Randolph Hearst. Now, our friend "Julius" was a regular chatterbox in the letters section, and he thought he was being quite clever by claiming that the letters in Hearst’s name proved he held the "hearts" of the people. He even tried to poke fun at Mr. Hughes by calling him a "guess." As our grumpy friend ANTI-FAKE pointed out, Julius had to sneak in an extra 's' to make that shoe fit! Bless his heart, he tried.
ANTI-FAKE also explained that there is more than one anagram you can make from HEARST. It just goes to show you, sugar, that the same set of letters can tell a dozen different stories depending on who is doing the shuffling. While Julius saw "hearts," his critic saw "haters" and "trashe"—which is just a fancy, old-fashioned way of spelling trash, I suppose! It’s a gentle reminder that words are like mirrors; they often reflect the person doing the looking more than the person being described.
Wouldn't it be a hoot if we decided our elections based on who could win an anagram contest? Instead of those long, noisy debates, we could just hand the candidates a bag of letter tiles and see who could find the most noble words hidden in their opponent’s name. I suspect we’d have a much quieter campaign season, and we’d certainly all learn a few new vocabulary words along the way! But I suppose the world isn't quite ready for a government run by the rules of a spelling bee.
With love and a wink, Gramma Ana